We’ll be here today, trying out the Beaver Ambassador’s ‘pin the beaver on the keystone’ activity today. (Thanks for the great idea, Steve!). And having kids paint beavers on keystones. It’s supposed to be hot today but here’s praying that it stays reasonable until 1. Wish us luck. Oh and we’ll also be trying out our lovely new banner for the first time. It’s made with the tattoos by Coyote Brush Studios on a long roll of linen, which I think came out nice.
Here’s Jon bravely trying out the activity.Shhh don’t tell him where the keystone is.
We have been so focused on the festival dilemma and getting ready for Visions of the Wild Sunday that we didn’t even notice this fine article in the Gazette on Sunday. Time to settle in and appreciate it. My goodness, Donna Beth took good notes of our conversation, she wrote every point I made and only got one thing fuzzy. Cheers to the Martinez Gazette which broke the beaver story a decade ago! And than you, Donna for making it official.
MARTINEZ, Calif. –The beavers are back, Heidi Perryman said after a mother, father and one kit were recorded swimming in Alhambra Creek near Susana Street.
“We noticed that the water was not moving at the Susana Street Bridge,” Perryman said about a visit in the past few days to the area. Close to a corner fence, Perryman, founder of the beaver-advocating “Worth a Dam” organization, spotted a tiny dam.
She and Moses Silva, who films the beavers independent of Perryman’s organization, investigated further and found another dam between Martinez Junior High School and Creekside Montessori’s building.
Unfortunately, the beavers weren’t spotted in time for the 10th edition of the Martinez Beaver Festival Aug. 5, Worth a Dam’s annual event that brings together the public along with multiple environmental and wildlife advocacy groups.
Well, I always say that beaver don’t keep secrets. Now it’s official. At least the mayor knows that people will know if something happens to them.
Last year, after nearly a year’s absence of downtown Martinez beavers after an entire litter and an older sibling had died, a pair of beavers returned just days before the 2016 festival. They later moved away as construction for the city’s intermodal site became too much for the animals to tolerate.
This year, for the first time in the festival’s history, there were no beavers to see near the downtown “Beaver Park,” so the traditional guided walks were canceled.
Perryman is not the least bit disappointed that this new beaver discovery came too late for this year’s celebration. First, she knew beavers remained in Martinez, but were living farther inland. Second, since the festival generates such goodwill toward wildlife, she said, “It’s like we summoned them!”
You do what you can and you see if it’s enough.
Perryman wants the positive feelings to continue, so she wrote people who live in the block where the new beaver family has been seen. Her organization provided advice about protecting plants and promised to assist in dealing with trees beavers might find attractive.
She also made the announcement of the beaver family discovery Thursday at a Martinez Kiwanis Club meeting, “because they are big beaver supporters.” She also thanked the organization for a grant it has awarded to Worth a Dam.“I thought it was the best place,” she sad about her choice of the club meeting to spread the news.
A correction. I meant they have supported our festival by giving us grants in the past. Not everyone at Kiwanis is a beaver supporter, in fact some were adamantly opposed when I first presented. I hope folks don’t think I’m taking them for granted.
However, she said the animals’ choice of a place to build a new dam means they aren’t easily seen by the public.
“The thing is, last time what saved them was they were visible,” she said. “This is not very visible, and we need people to be concerned about them. You could see them if you are lucky, if you stand on the Susana Street bridge, because they are working on the dam near Susana Street Park.
Also, Perryman doesn’t believe the little dams will survive the first big storm of winter.
“It will be too much for that tiny dam,” she said. “It’s very narrow, maybe 10 feet across. The force of the water will push the dam – it will blow out.”
Unlike the much larger dam built earlier in the city’s downtown, this dam should cause no flooding problems while it lasts, she said.
“That creek bank is 40 feet, and that dam is 2 feet high,” she said.
If the dam is destroyed, the beaver family likely will move “to where it’s less conflicted.” That could be eight blocks inland, where the creek is wider, she said.
I said ‘constricted’, but close enough. I meant a wider creek so the water pressure is spread out over more area.
Perryman said the family is made up of a female, a male and their small kit. They were spotted earlier in August by one of Perryman’s friends, who said the adults would move around, followed by a little muskrat. “She was so impressed that wherever they went the little muskrat followed them around,” Perryman said.
But Perryman had a hunch that was no muskrat. When she and Silva saw the animals, she recognized the “muskrat” was a beaver kit.
The rest of the family story sounds like a soap opera.
The female, which Perryman and others have recognized, is the older of the two adults. She was the second mate of the first male beaver seen in the downtown area in 2007. She became his mate after his earlier mate died.
Great documentation!
But he was much older than this female, and eventually he succumbed, too, Perryman said.
Now this “second wife” has found a new mate – and this male is younger and smaller than she. They are the beaver couple Silva found and filmed mating just before the 2016 Beaver Festival.
Another indication of the male’s age is that the couple’s mating produced just one kit, common for younger male beavers, Perryman said. The youngster may be about 10 months old, she said.
Okay, I do dimly remember saying something like this and instantly regretting it at the end of our goliath interview, but I shouldn’t have. It’s stupid, so don’t quote me on this. Young FEMALES have fewer kits. I have no ideas about young males sponsoring fewer kits, and I don’t think there’s any research on that.
“He’s a cute little guy,” she said.
Should the beavers decide to stay in the Susana Street area, Perryman might consider moving the Beaver Festival to Susana Street Park. “It’s a lovely venue, and a great chalk artist wants to do a wildlife painting if we can figure out how,” she said.
Meanwhile, Perryman is happy just to see beavers in Martinez again. “It’s very sweet. It’s very wonderful. I’m really thrilled,” she said.
The money quote:
“I want people to know that beavers need them now as much as they did 10 years ago,” she said. “When we solved that problem 10 years ago, we were doing something brand new. Now it’s old school. This is something we already have learned how to solve.”
Wow. That article reminds me what a whirlwind this all has been – between finding the dam, getting Moses to explore, seeing the footage, making the film, getting myself invited to Kiwanis, writing the neighbors, actually going to Kiwanis, contacting the chalk artist and finding out it could work, and talking to folks about possibly moving the festival. No wonder I’m tired!
If you ask Sara Melnicoff of Moab Solutions, part of the Mill Creek Partnership, Mill Creek had 11 or more beaver dams this spring. Then in July every dam was gone.
Melnicoff first noticed the damage mid-July, before the heavy rains of July 24 and 25 caused flooding in the creek. She contacted Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, who had previously participated in writing Utah’s beaver management plan. O’Brien took photographs of the dams, some of which had been notched or had sticks pulled out of them.
“The dams had been compromised a few days before the flooding,” O’Brien said. “I have a whole series of photos that I documented for BLM of all 11 dams and each one has a notch cut out of the center. That’s all that it takes [to compromise the dam].”
11 dams suddenly gone! This sounds like a job for inspector beaver! (sorry, couldn’t resist.) Are there any suspects?
Eyewitness accounts support the claim that vandalism was involved. Maria Roberts, a Forest Service employee, was hiking with friends in mid-July when she saw a man pulling sticks out of the dams.
“I saw a guy, looked like he was pulling branches apart from the beaver dam. I figured he was supposed to be there, like he was working,” Roberts said. Another witness took photos of the man.
The day before the dams were compromised, Melnicoff said, she received an email from an unknown address concerned that the beavers were causing E. coli bacteria in town. O’Brien said that in her experience, beavers are not known to cause E. coli but do benefit the ecosystems they inhabit.
Oh ho! So we have a suspect AND a motive! Call in the expert witness…
“When they come up streams and have to build dams to get two and a half feet [of water to build their lodges], there is then a whole cascade of effects that happen,” O’Brien said. “Streams are often incised from grazing, from long-ago blow-outs of cattle ponds, from floods and so on and really the only thing that can restore that stream is basically woody debris … beaver are the chief engineers that do that.”
O’Brien said that beaver dams create habitat for other animals as well.
“When a beaver comes in and starts making a pond, that opens that up and now ducks come and shorebirds come and they drown the trees, which makes them perfect for cavity nesting birds, which makes it perfect for secondary cavity nesters who use the holes of cavity nesters,” O’Brien said. “[The] water behind the pond is a great nursery for fish. And then of course otter can come into the system because there’s fish. And muskrats are there. And water voles are there, so one thing that the beavers do is make the system far more complex. Without beaver, in a lot of, say, your mountains here, it’s a just strip of water coming through and there’s trees on either side.”
Thank you, Dr. Obrien. Excellent and relevant testimony. Call the next witness!
Arne Hultquist, director of the Moab Area Watershed Partnership, agreed that beavers are not the cause of E. coli in Mill Creek. “If I was having problems with beavers and E. coli, I would be seeing it at that site [above the Power Dam] and I don’t see it at that site. I see it down in town,” said Hulquist, who conducts water quality tests at various points around Moab.
Ah HA! So the beavers were blamed for something they didn’t even do! Their dams were destroyed and then all the wildlife they supported suffered the results. Thank goodness our crack team is on the case!
The DWR is still actively investigating the incident, according to Wolford. The DWR is looking into the incident based on the legal definition of wildlife crime, Wolford told The Times-Independent.
“We are still investigating [and] we have one final loose end to tie up, but it does not look as if charges will be filed,” Wolford said.
“There’s not really a crime for breaching a dam,” Wolford said. “The crime comes after, if it’s either displaced beaver or killed beaver. If there’s an actual beaver that’s dead in the area, that’s where the actual crime starts to come into play.”
Wolford added that the dams might have already been abandoned. “It’s possible that they were [abandoned to start with] because if the beaver were there, those dams would be built back up really fast,” Wolford said. “[It] usually only takes them a night to do it, especially the ones that tend to look like they were more man-made breached. They were small enough breaches that the beaver would have been back in immediately. The ones that are bigger breaches, those ones definitely look like flooding issues. As wildlife, we like beaver. They do a lot of good to the ecosystem and help out things quite a bit.”
The jewels might have stolen themselves, officer. It happens all the time in the real world. No fingers to point, nobody to blame, nothing to see here. Besides they’re just BEAVERS for god sake. How much should we really care?
I don’t know about you but that does not sound like they’re actively looking into it to me.
It’s nice to see beaver dramas happen in other towns. This so reminds me of the early days in Martinez. There was one day when someone left oleander branches on the dam and people were worried it was a plot to poison the beavers and the whole town was in an uproar. It turned out it was a well meaning ET who loved them and just thought she was doing something nice.
Ahh memories.
The clincher on this case is that the actual date on this story from Moab is 2013. I don’t know why it’s running again, but I guess they aren’t still ‘working on it’? Maybe they’re doing this instead.
Last year, you might remember I saw this article about artist Amy Gallaher Hall. I was so impressed with her work and especially her illustration of a beaver that I couldn’t help imagining her at the festival. It turned out she was a regular visitor to the Napa beavers at Tulocay creek and even knew Rusty. She loved beavers and would love to come to the festival. There was one caveat. She couldn’t come in the first two weeks of August. Too bad. That would have been so cool.
Flash forward to the week after the festival, when we discovered our beavers were living in the creek near Susanna Street Park. We were so excited and made some careful decisions about how to share the news to maximize their safety. We started thinking and looking at Susanna Street park with new eyes. It had beavers. It had shade. It had a large beautiful central plaza that would be perfect for chalk art. A big colored square in the circle for Amy to work and a smaller ring around the outside for all the children’s drawing she would inspire. I could practically see it.
Just on the off chance we asked if Amy would still be willing. She said she’d love to! We asked ourselves if the festival could survive changing date, and park to follow the beavers north 8 blocks? I thought we could. So I started to talk to the city about the idea. Turns out, like everything else in Martinez, (take for example the 19 page special use application) use of that historic park is complicated. There can only be two events in August, one in September and none at all in July.
If the word byzantine just sprung to mind, trust me, you’re not alone.
So Art in the Park is the first event, and has been around for 50 years and is a beloved and unchangeable tradition. What was the other? Turns out it was Vallejo Shakespeare that used to be at the Marina and just moved there last year. Maybe they could be persuaded to move back or move their date? I imagined the lovely Susanna street stage would would be hard for them to give up, but considered that by not using our regular park we would save money on restrooms, electricity and the stage. Maybe a donation would sweeten the offer?
I tracked down the organizer and used my best manners to woo as persuasively as I could. I showed her cute pictures of beavers, children with painted tails and quoted that the quality of mercy is not strained. No Dice. It was all for naught. Yesterday morning I found out it wasn’t possible. VShakes was committed in the other summer months to other cities and could only come to Martinez in August, and couldn’t go back to the Marina because of the newly forming professional back park there. It wasn’t possible to change the rules and let three events in August, because Martinez. So that meant we could not be in that park and Amy could NOT deck the halls with beavers.
It was so unfair. Martinez probably paid for Vallejo Shakespeare to come and the beavers were native and should have precedence. To say I was disheartened is a vast understatement. For two entire hours I was depressed and hopeless. I even got a tooth ache and a cough.
The city said helpfully that June was open and maybe that would work? It sounded completely horrible to me but I thought I’d ask Amy and see. She said she would be happy to do any weekend in June and suddenly the cough started to go away. Could we get away with moving the month, and the park? Maybe if our famous beavers were back and we had a famous artist to promote it?
So we’re in the thinking phase on this. Pros of June would be that we could hit schools before they close and announce it with fliers. It would be less hot and horrible. We could promote it at earth day too and invest in some advertising. The media loves Amy and especially likes to watch her work. And June is the month when kits are born.
Cons would be it’s not August. It’s only 10 months away. Some of our regulars might not be available. It’s a big change for people to adapt too. No one might come. Our city could be insane and not want her to draw on their precious cement.
Stay tuned. Consider this a work in progress. But my tooth and cough are gone.
This is footage of the hard working Utah DWR group installing BDA’s in the higher elevations of Utah. They make little beaver dams to save water and hope it will help out the wildlife and lure beavers to move in. Up until this VERY moment I always thought Utah was smarter than us about beavers. Not anymore.
At first glance, it appears the wrong species has been building dams in Miller Creek. DWR habitat crews have taken on the beaver’s usual role, dropping in support poles, weaving in tree branches and packing mud on the structures they’re building. The goal of this unusual project is to re-flood the floodplain and create pools for the river’s sensitive and endangered fish. Having more water in the area will also benefit the mammals and birds that use the stream corridor.
So far so good. But now comes the CRASH! Feet of clay indeed!
Biologists hope that beavers will eventually move into the structures and continue the effort.
For just a moment I’m going to amuse myself with the absurd thought that all the biologists of Utah (and not a few confused reports) really believe that beavers live in dams. In my fantasy they are truly standing by with clipboards and befuddled looks on their faces wondering why the animals don’t move IN to these lovely solid walls they built. Heh heh. Do they also wonder why bird nests have those ridiculous holes in them, and aren’t just solid twig bricks too?
Okay, I’m done. I do not for a moment believe this comment is the work of a biologist. Once again Heidi will explain kindly to reporters that beavers don’t live IN the dam. The dam is solid. Like a wall built to hold back water. It doesn’t have an inside. Think of it like a mattress. You don’t sleep inside your mattress do you? Beavers live in the lodge. I realize this requires you to learn two words instead of one, but I truly think you’re up to it. (Most of you.)
Honestly, Utah is too good for rookie mistakes like this.
Projects like these help raise the water table and restore natural floodplains, improving habitat for birds, fish and other wildlife. A special thanks to ConocoPhillips and Trout Unlimited, who have been great partners on this and many other projects!
I received the grant application for 2018 from the Fish and Wildlife Commission and have been thinking a little about possible projects when I came across this lovely drawing by Jane Grant Tentas of New Hampshire. I love the inviting curiosity of the girl, the crisp vibrancy of the colors and the rich duality of the world. My goodness if this were only a freshwater habitat it would be so valuable to teach kids about ecosystems above and below water.
As it happens, Jane teaches high school art about 20 minutes away from our beaver friend Art Wolinsky. So I’m hoping he puts in a good word for beavers, and maybe we can persuade her to go fresh?
We’ll be here today, trying out the Beaver Ambassador’s ‘pin the beaver on the keystone’ activity today. (Thanks for the great idea, Steve!). And having kids paint beavers on keystones. It’s supposed to be hot today but here’s praying that it stays reasonable until 1. Wish us luck. Oh and we’ll also be trying out our lovely new banner for the first time. It’s made with the tattoos by Coyote Brush Studios on a long roll of linen, which I think came out nice.
Here’s Jon bravely trying out the activity.Shhh don’t tell him where the keystone is.
If you ask Sara Melnicoff of Moab Solutions, part of the Mill Creek Partnership, Mill Creek had 11 or more beaver dams this spring. Then in July every dam was gone.
Eyewitness accounts support the claim that vandalism was involved. Maria Roberts, a Forest Service employee, was hiking with friends in mid-July when she saw a man pulling sticks out of the dams.
“When they come up streams and have to build dams to get two and a half feet [of water to build their lodges], there is then a whole cascade of effects that happen,” O’Brien said. “Streams are often incised from grazing, from long-ago blow-outs of cattle ponds, from floods and so on and really the only thing that can restore that stream is basically woody debris … beaver are the chief engineers that do that.”
dary cavity nesters who use the holes of cavity nesters,” O’Brien said. “[The] water behind the pond is a great nursery for fish. And then of course otter can come into the system because there’s fish. And muskrats are there. And water voles are there, so one thing that the beavers do is make the system far more complex. Without beaver, in a lot of, say, your mountains here, it’s a just strip of water coming through and there’s trees on either side.”
Arne Hultquist, director of the Moab Area Watershed Partnership, agreed that beavers are not the cause of E. coli in Mill Creek. “If I was having problems with beavers and E. coli, I would be seeing it at that site [above the Power Dam] and I don’t see it at that site. I see it down in town,” said Hulquist, who conducts water quality tests at various points around Moab.
Last year, you might remember I saw this article about artist 
So we’re in the thinking phase on this. Pros of June would be that we could hit schools before they close and announce it with fliers. It would be less hot and horrible. We could promote it at earth day too and invest in some advertising. The media loves Amy and especially likes to watch her work. And June is the month when kits are born.
